


A Gender of Dragons and Science

by AsagaoSylph



Series: A Home Changes With You [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Agender Character, Agender Pidge | Katie Holt, Asexual Pidge | Katie Holt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gender Confusion, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Lance & Pidge | Katie Holt Friendship, M/M, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Trans Keith (Voltron), Trans Lance (Voltron), eventually, gender crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:55:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22190671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsagaoSylph/pseuds/AsagaoSylph
Summary: Because, yes, when she was writing out a mechanical upgrade procedure to be transmitted throughout the galaxy for fortifications against the Galra, what she wanted was arandom gender crisis! All because she instinctively usedthemwhen referring to herself on the final page! Perfect! Just! Perfect!
Relationships: Allura & Pidge | Katie Holt, Hunk & Pidge | Katie Holt, Keith/Lance (Voltron), Lance & Pidge | Katie Holt
Series: A Home Changes With You [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1597330
Comments: 4
Kudos: 57





	A Gender of Dragons and Science

Pidge blinked at her computer screen. Then she blinked again. Hunk continued bustling around her—around _them_?—and carting boxes of supplies into his Lion, not noticing his friend’s sudden stillness. It felt like someone had just flipped her on her head and then spun her a full 360 degrees, leaving her still upside-down and too confused to even scream at whatever imbecil had thought that would be _remotely_ helpful. Because, yes, when she was writing out a mechanical upgrade procedure to be transmitted throughout the galaxy for fortifications against the Galra, what she wanted was a _random gender crisis_! All because she instinctively used _them_ when referring to herself on the final page! Perfect! Just! Perfect!

Pidge growled, scribbling in the last few instructions, praying that whatever deity had decided to curse her with so many labels would at least _take responsibility for this one and make her—their? Ugh, whichever!—final words legible_ , and chucked it into the back of Hunk’s head.

“Ow!”

“There! I finished your stupid manual, now I’m going to go lab!” Snapped Pidge, snatching up her computer and ignoring her use of _lab_ as a verb in favor of stalking from the room.

“Uh, have fun? Don’t forget, you and Allura have that girls’ night with Lance tomorrow!” Called Hunk, scooping up the stapled papers from the floor and quirking an eyebrow after the fuming Green Paladin.

Well, she’d always hated having to explain herself to normal people, so he guessed it wasn’t that odd. Hunk sighed, tapping his comm to call Coran so he could copy these manuals; Hunk would rather fight another haunted castle than touching that print machine.

Pidge stomped to their room, kicking the panel beside her door (it had learned to read her footprint as well as their handprint after enough of that), and locking it behind her. Great, Hunk! Thanks for the casual cisgender reminder! Not helping the whole, oh, _gender crisis thing_! Pidge snarled and tossed their computer onto her bed. Their mind was surging, a cacophony of screeching thoughts, of ideas and principles she had never been able to fully explore before, of _you never knew so it can’t be_ and _you always knew something was off_ and _you’ve done this a thousand times_ and _you always said you were a girl in the end_ and _if you **keep having crises** then maybe that label’s not as accurate as you want it to be—_

Pidge threw herself onto their bed and pulled on their headphones, scrolling through her favorite playlist and jabbing the button to start up the most soothing song they could find. She exhaled, pushing air past their lips in a concentrated stream, and began clicking through definitions online. _Start with what you know_ , she reminded herself. _It’s just like any other line of code in the freaking jungle that makes up your identity; start with what you know and then go from there._

Pidge knew a…well, a lot about gender. They had done research into this maybe one too many times, had tried to understand the community, had entrenched herself in it without entirely meaning to due to her friend selection. They had been using they/them pronouns for their friends for a while now, so maybe she had just gotten used to it? Had started thinking of those pronouns as the standard, the norm, and was naturally gravitating towards that? Yeah, that had to be it. Pidge would find exactly what she had found before in the past; she would research this a lot and then come to the conclusion that she was a girl. Right. Okay. That sounded good.

Because she _had_ to. She didn’t want to upend her entire life because of a new gender identity, didn’t want to lose the girl she had made herself into, didn’t want to remake herself just to find that she had been wrong the whole time! And, yes! Pidge knew that discovering more about your identity meant you had always been that way and you shouldn’t have to remake yourself to fit into that label, so maybe she _was_ wrong and she was a girl and it was okay and she didn’t have to try and deal with—

Pidge groaned, stuffing a pillow over her face and punching the button on her comm to call Lance. Was her best friend at a Blade of Marmora base right then to get a status update on a recent operation and probably not supposed to be picking up their call? Yes. Did Pidge care? Nope. Not at all. Pidge was having a crisis and she had a long talk with Lance a couple of movements ago about being open with one another about more stuff. This counted as a thing!

“Pidge?” Came Lance’s voice, his face popping up on the screen with a grin. “Heya! How are you doing?”

“Gender crisis!” Groaned Pidge, smacking her face with the pillow repeatedly. “And! All! Because! I! Automatically! Used! They! As! A! Pronoun! For! Myself! So now my brain has decided to have a whole crisis over it and I’m going to do research into definition and stuff, but I’m going to end up realizing I’m cisgender again because I always do and that’s what’s going to happen this time too!”

Lance nodded along, his eyes fixed on her unwaveringly. As they began growling though, Lance slowly and carefully arched an eyebrow.

“You do know that if you go in with that mindset—”

“That I’m going to find out I’m cisgender! Yes! That’s! The! Point!” Screeched Pidge. “I’m already an asexual panromantic! I don’t need another label!”

Lance giggled, leaning back against a wall and grinning at her through the screen.

“Once your brain starts with labels, it never stops,” he teased. “This is why I don’t really care about them. But look, don’t worry so much, Pidgey. I’m going to accept and love you no matter what you decide, and so will the rest of the team or I’ll lock them in the training room and sic that _Altean-language-learning-program-bear_ on them. It’s okay.”

Pidge groaned, slowly lifting the pillow off their face and tossing it across the room.

“It’s just…I don’t want to claim the label falsely. I don’t want to undermine people using that,” she grumbled. “Plus, with Keith coming out as a trans guy and all that recently, I don’t want Shiro to think I’m just copying him. And I—I don’t want everyone to start treating me differently.”

Lance ducked under a knife whizzing down the hallway without even a second glance, and rested his chin in his palm his other eyebrow rose to join the arched one.

“That’s a lot of _just_ s, Pidgeon,” teased Lance, “but I get where you’re coming from. Look, there’s no wrong way to be part of the non-binary community. You don’t have to always have known or some other quiznakery, and you don’t have to feel dysphoric to be a member. If I remember right from when Marco came shrieking to me about not feeling totally like a boy, the biggest thing was that they were scared about losing who they were because their gender identity was changing. They felt like they were losing connection with who they had been, but were tapping into someone they always knew they had the potential to be.”

Pidge scowled.

“I feel called out.”

“Nice,” replied Lance between laughs as he hopped into an air du— _what was he doing_?! “So, why don’t you go do your research into the different identities? Just keep an open mind, Pidgey. And remember, this isn’t going to change anything between you and I. Well, I mean, obviously some things will shift. Like, let me know if you want me to use different pronouns and a different name, okay? But this doesn’t mean that you, as a person, are suddenly different, and it doesn’t mean I’m going to look at you as anyone other than yourself.”

Pidge sighed, fingers plucking at their pillow and eyes drifting across the ceiling.

“Right. Okay. I’ll do that.”

“Sweet! You want me to stay on?”

“Uh, you seem kinda…busy? Like, I mean—DID YOU JUST ALMOST GET IMPALED?!”

Lance winked.

“Almost,” he emphasized, as if the sword wasn’t inches from his hand and jerking through the metal towards his fingers. “Uh, probably going to run now!”

“Go!” Shrieked Pidge. “Don’t die! See you back at the Castle, love you!”

“Awww, love you too, Pidgey. See you soon!” Promised Lance, clicking away from the call with a last sunshine grin and a wave.

Pidge grumbled, tossing her communicator to the side and yanking their computer into their lap. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. It was fine. _This was fine_. Pidge just had to research and find a label that she felt fit them the best, and she could work with the crisis from there.

Pidge sighed, cracked their neck, and stretched her arms far over their head.

“Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

Over a varga later, Pidge growled down at the list in front of them. They had already knocked off intergender (didn’t feel right), amalgagender (not intersex), neutrois (close, but no), and bi/pangender just didn’t seem to embody the feeling Pidge was definitely able to identify as not cisgender. Genderfluid wasn’t quite right either, and while demigirl seemed close, Pidge wasn’t sure they felt it fully applied.

Pidge glowered at the two words that were left on their list.

Non-binary.

Agender.

Pidge groaned, plopping her notebook on top of their head and flopping back onto her bed. Agender had kind of nailed it when the article talked about feeling like they could connect with some sort of gender, but not one that had any other name, and the ones she had found outside of the binary just didn’t fit.

Pidge closed their eyes and breathed in. Out. In. Out. They booted up another relaxing song, and began running through images online. Maybe if she heard other people talking about their experiences with being agender, this would be easier. Either way, their label fit under non-binary, so that wasn’t the issue. Non-binary just didn’t seem to explain the feeling Pidge had inside, though she would hardly deny that it was part of it. There was something else there, something they wanted a name for.

And Pidge would be quiznaked if she didn’t get what they wanted.

Grumbling to herself, Pidge continued scrolling through the stories (why were there almost none on being agender? Come on), the images (ooooooo, they almost wished she was aromantic now so they could use AAA, but Pidge was definitely pan), the jokes about androgyny (yeah, it was pretty fun), and the snippets they could find. The only thing was, despite what the article had said, everyone who described their experiences with agender (what, two people?) commented on an absence of gender, which was what Pidge had originally thought was agender. But that wasn’t quite right. Pidge didn’t feel like she had no gender, rather like some combination of female and agender. Like a partial connection to being a girl (wow did that word not seem to apply anymore) and one to being agender, not to any masculinity.

Like gray asexual except agender.

Pidge sighed, pressing a hand to their forehead, and continued scrolling through pictures. Then their eyes flickered to the side, and a smile split her lips. They clicked on the image, enlarging it and snickering. It was of a man clutching three flags; the asexual one she had looked so hard to find, the pan one they had hanging in her room, and the agender one she recognized from the web by now. Pidge grinned, wondering if there was any way to hack back into their tumblr and reblog it because, geez, this guy was perfect; it wasn’t often that she saw someone holding all of their fla—

Pidge blinked.

Wait.

Their flags?

Since when had agender become—well—them? Since when had Pidge started feeling comfortable using both she/her and they/them pronouns? Since when had she started looking solely for agender stuff instead of non-binary, for that flag so that their face could split into a smile and relax because they were being represented, she was right there in those stripes—

Pidge groaned, flopping over onto her back and staring at the ceiling.

“I’m agender,” they tried, testing out the words on their lips.

It was like a switch had been flipped; Pidge could feel every inch of their body, could feel it tingling like it had since she was a kid, but in a…well, in a comfortable way. They swallowed, raising a hand and staring as everything seemed to focus around them. She felt…relaxed. Safe in their own skin in a way they hadn’t since puberty had started. And she hadn’t even noticed, just thought this was normal, part of society’s structures that made her feel afraid, thus leaving them uncomfortable in their skin. Maybe not.

Maybe Pidge could feel comfortable as herself.

“I’m agender,” stated Pidge, curling their hands into fists and grinning at the ceiling. “I’m agender.”

A rush flooded her, a tinge of dizziness that probably came from skipping lunch on the edges, but Pidge welcomed all of it. She/her and they/them pronouns. Agender.

Finally, finally, Pidge could breathe easily again. They were agender. And stars, it felt even better than when she finally said they were asexual. It felt like a homecoming after too long away: a little bit scared, a little bit excited, not sure of what it would bring in the future, and not able to stop because there was so, so, _so much relief_. It felt like they were herself again.

Pidge laughed, sprawled on their bed a couple of vargas later with music blasting through her headphones, foot tapping the edge of the bed as the last song came to an end. Just in time. They smirked, listening to the vague creak of Lance’s footsteps outside the door, soft to be sure he wasn’t waking any of them up. She sank into the bed and exhaled, waiting for his knock. They couldn’t wait to tell him that one of his best friends was agender. She really wanted to see his reacti—

OH ALTEA, THEY STILL HAD TO TELL THE TEAM! Pidge rolled over and immediately smothered her face into the pillow to _screech_.

“Pidge? You awake?” Asked Lance, knocking lightly on their door, and Pidge slapped the button to open it up. “Hey, Pidgey! How are you doi—”

“ _I DON’T WANT TO!_ ”

“Huh?”

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing!
> 
> I did a fair amount of research, but please let me know if I got anything wrong! And yes, Pidge uses both gender-neutral (they/them) and female (she/her) pronouns throughout this series.
> 
> Magnetic In Our Purple Season 8 is under construction, I promise!
> 
> My tumblr is at https://asagaosylph.tumblr.com/ :D


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